Smart SOA. Simple to advanced.

It's smart to be ready for growth. It's smart to anticipate your future business needs. It's smart to make the most of SOA today, with help from IBM. Meet new and changing customer demands. Compete in a global marketplace. Realise the benefits of innovative business models and new technologies.

Figure 1: The Business Value of Smart SOA

Are you ready to become a globally integrated enterprise (US)? Smart SOA business offerings from IBM can help get you there by taking an industry-focused and holistic approach to operations that provide business value at every stage of the continuum, from basic to advanced initiatives.

• Glimpse the future of your industry in the next decade and beyond. IBM's Institute for Business Value (US) delivers compelling insights around key industry trends with access to more than 35 original thought leadership projects a year.

To become a globally integrated enterprise, start by defining your winning innovative strategy-then implement it. Use the right tools to optimise your business processes-then refine them. Continuously. Improve your ability to make better business decisions, by monitoring key industry-specific metrics. Utilise SOA to continuously align your IT and business sides of the house-and be prepared to be amazed at how it can put you ahead of the competition. And along the way, utilise Smart SOA to continuously improve and optimise your business performance.

Becoming a globally integrated enterprise requires developing new, innovative business models that differentiate you from the competition. Smart SOA business offerings from IBM will help you to assess where you stand today and give you the tools you need to effectively implement change, not just today but ongoing.

• Assess and develop innovative business models with the new globally integrated enterprise Assessment. This professional service offering identifies and benchmarks business models' capabilities against world-class standards.
• Use the pioneering Key Agility Indicators (KAIs) to position yourself for the future. IBM has selected a combination of open standard metrics and business drivers that together provide a mechanism for evaluating agility. KAIs can help assess operational costs, efficiencies and quality measures.

Your business processes are a critical part of transforming into a globally integrated enterprise through SOA. Business process management (BPM) enabled by Smart SOA optimises and innovates processes at an accelerated pace, to help you improve those processes that give your organisation a competitive advantage. Leveraged in the right way - that is, not just modeling processes, but also simulating outcomes and what-if scenarios, using business rules to guide process flow, and monitoring key business metrics to refine processes - BPM enabled by SOA can help you go beyond basic process improvement to making better decisions about that improvement and investment.

To support this approach to BPM enabled by SOA, IBM is strengthening its BPM Methodology, a comprehensive set of methodologies for planning, designing, modeling, simulating, measuring and optimising business processes. Improvements include a Process Governance organisation and framework, a technology agnostic approach, and an even broader and deeper coverage of the components you need to be successful with BPM enabled by SOA.

Additions and enhancements to IBM's BPM offerings also support this comprehensive approach to BPM enabled by SOA.

• Model, analyse and simulate business processes with IBM WebSphere Business Modeler. New features provide better support for simulation, traceability, and interoperability with key software solutions - all for greater collaboration between business analysts and IT professionals.
• Accelerate deployment into an SOA environment with industry-specific best practices using IBM WebSphere Business Services Fabric and its associated IBM Industry Content Packs. The pre-built, customisable Industry Content Packs help leverage industry standards and best practices to speed your time to value. IBM is offering new industry content packs in
  • Banking
  • Healthcare
  • Insurance
  • Telecommunications
  _as well as five new composite business services.
• Measure results of the changes you've made to your business processes supported by SOA to help continuously optimise and innovate with key IBM offerings that help you get the right information at the right time for the right decisions.
  • Enhancements to IBM WebSphere Business Monitor put the power of monitoring in the hands of the business users through direct control of the creation of new KPIs without involving IT
  • For an integrated view of your business and IT environment, the IBM Business of IT Dashboard provides overall monitoring and real time, contextual measurement.
  • The IBM Benchmarking Wizard, available through IBM Services, allows you to compare your performance to your peers through standard cross-industry metrics.

The best-run companies know that IT must move in lockstep with business-always. Rapid changes on the business side need to be immediately supported by the IT side.

For many organisations, Smart SOA delivers the flexibility and agility to support the evolving business strategy of a globally integrated enterprise. Through Smart SOA, businesses introduce agility into their systems for deep insight into performance and changing business conditions while they optimise their processes and operations to capitalize on the shifting marketplace.

Get the news directly from top IBM executives on October 9th-register for the live webcast "Accelerating Business Agility with Smart SOA" (US).